SUMMARY:
Peer-reviewed journals used to perform two functions for research
and researchers -- (1) peer review and (2) distribution -- and research
libraries used to perform two more -- (3) archiving and (4) access
provision. In the online age, journals will need only to provide the
peer-review service. Authors will self-archive their papers, both before
and after peer review, in their institutional Eprint Archives, which
will all be interoperable with one another, providing open access to all
peer-reviewed research output as if it were all in one global archive.

There currently exist at least 20,000 peer-reviewed journals, across
all scholarly and scientific disciplines, published in most of the research-active
nations and tongues of the world. The (at least) 2 million articles that
appear in them annually are only accepted for publication after they have
successfully met the quality-standards of the particular journal to which
they were submitted. There is a hierarchy of quality standards across journals,
from the most rigorous ones at the top -- usually the journals with the
highest rejection rates and the highest "impact factors" (the number of
times their articles are cited by other articles) -- all the way down to
a virtual vanity press at the bottom.

The responsibility for maintaining each journal's quality standards
is that of the editor(s) and referees. The editor chooses qualified experts
("peers") who then review the submissions and recommend acceptance, rejection,
or various degrees of revision.

In the past, journals were not concerned with archiving. Their contents
appeared on paper and the journal's responsibility was the peer review,
editing, markup, typesetting, proofing, printing, and distribution of the
paper texts. It was the subscribers (individual or institutional) who had
to concern themselves with the archiving and preservation, usually in the
form of the occupation of space on library shelves, occasionally supplemented
by copying onto microfiche as a backup. The main backup, however, was the
(presumably) preserved multiple copies on individual and institutional
library shelves all over the world. It was this distributedness and redundancy
that ensured that refereed journals were archival and did not vanish within
a few days of printing, as ephemeral newspapers and leaflets might do.

In recent decades, journals have increasingly produced online versions
in addition to on-paper versions of their contents. Initially, the online
version was offered as an extra feature for institutional subscribers,
and could be received only if the institution also subscribed to the paper
version. Eventually, institutional site-licenses to the online version
alone became a desired option for institutions. For approximately the same
price as a paper subscription, online licenses offered much wider and more
convenient access to institutional users than a single paper subscription
ever could do.

This new option raised the problem of archiving again, however: Who
owns and maintains the online archive of past issues? In paper days, it
was clear that the subscriber owned the "archive," in the form of the enduring
paper edition on the shelf. But with digital texts there is the question
of storing them, upgrading them with each advance in technology, and in
general seeing to it that they remain accessible to all institutional users
online permanently.

If the journal maintains the online archive, (1) what happens when an
institution discontinues its subscription? No new issues are received,
of course, but (2) what about past issues, already paid for?

And (3) are publishers really in a position to become archivists too,
adding to their traditional functions (peer review, editing, etc.) the
function of permanent online archiving, upgrading, migration, preservation,
and search/access-provision? Are these traditional library- and digital-library
functions now to become publisher functions?

There is not yet a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, but
the means of implementing them, once we decide on what the correct answers
are, have meanwhile already been created.

First, a means was needed to make the digital literature "interoperable."
This required agreeing on a shared metadata tagging convention that would
allow distributed digital archives to share information automatically,
so that their contents were navigable as if they were all in the same place
and in the same format. An unambiguous vocabulary had to be agreed upon
so that digital texts could be tagged by their author, title, publication
date, journal, volume, issue, etc. (along with keywords, subject classification,
citation-linking, and even an inverted full-text index for searching).

These "metadata" tags could then be "harvested," both by individual
users and by search engines that provided sophisticated navigational capabilities.
In principle, the outcome would be as if each of the annual 2 million articles
in the 20,000 peer-reviewed journals were all in one global archive.

This shared metadata tagging convention has been provided by the Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) http://www.openarchives.org
and is being adopted by a growing number of archives, including both journal
archives and institutional archives. The OAI convention, however, does
not answer the question of who should do the archiving: journals or institutions.

Another growing movement, the Budapest Open Access Iniatitive (BOAI)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
is likely to influence this outcome. To understand the form this may take,
we have to distinguish two kinds of Archives, "Open Archives," which are
all OAI-compliant Archives, and "Open-Access Archives," which are not only
OAI-compliant, but access to their full-text contents is free.

Explaining why and how free online access is the optimal and inevitable
solution for this special literature (of 20,000 peer-reviewed journals)
goes beyond the scope of this article, but it is based on the fact that
this literature differs from most other literatures in that it is without
exception all an author give-away: Not one of the authors of the
annual 2 million refereed articles seeks royalties or fees in exchange
for his text. All these authors seek is as many readers and users as
possible, for it is the research impact of these articles -- of
which a rough measure is the number of times each is cited -- that brings
these authors their rewards (employment, promotion, tenure, grants, prizes,
prestige). It is not subscription/license sales revenue that brings authors
these rewards: on the contrary, these toll-based access-barriers are also
impact-barriers, and therefore at odds with the interests of research and
researchers.

Hence, from their authors' point of view, the optimal solution for archiving
is that the archives should be Open-Access Archives. There are two ways
to achieve this. One is that (a) the journals add archiving to their
existing services and make the contents of their archives Open-Access.

This is on the face of it a rather unrealistic thing to ask from journals,
for it asks them to take on additional expenses, over and above their traditional
ones, and yet to seek no revenue in exchange, but instead give away all
their contents online. It becomes somewhat more realistic if we anticipate
a future time when there is no longer any demand for the on-paper version,
and so it, and all its associated expenses, can be eliminated, by downsizing
to only the essentials.

It has been estimated that if journals performed only peer review, and
nothing else, becoming only quality-control service-providers and certifiers,
then their expenses per article would be reduced by about 75%. The average
revenue per article is currently $2000 (the sum of all subscription, license,
and pay-per-view income, mostly paid by institutions). But this still leaves
$500 per article to be recovered, somehow: How to do it if the text is
given away for free?

We will return to this question in a moment, noting only that it is
still futuristic, becoming relevant only when there is no longer enough
demand for the paper version to cover all the costs as it had in the past.
There are conceivably sources for covering a cost of $500 per article,
including research grants and other possible sources of institutional or
governmental subsidy in the interest of open access to research. But there
is another possibility, not calling for subsidy:

The second way to achieve Open-Access Archives -- an immediate rather
than a future-contigent way like (a) -- is through (b) the author/institution
self-archiving of all peer-reviewed articles in their own institutional
Eprint Archives. Institutions create Open-Access Eprint Archives for
all of their own peer-reviewed research output: http://www.eprints.org.
This provides immediate open access to the entire peer-reviewed journal
literature for all would-be users, everywhere.

While the on-paper versions continue to be sold and bought, that continues
to be the "true" archive, and all publication costs are covered the old
way (through subscription and license payments to journals). But if and
when the day arrives when there is no longer any demand or market for the
publisher's paper version, institutions will by the same token have the
100% annual windfall savings out of which to redirect the 25% needed to
cover the peer review costs for their own annual research output. And at
that point the interoperable, OAI-compliant institutional Eprint Archives
will also become the true archives of the peer-reviewed journal literature.